Sky News has produced a multimedia timeline detailing the events and news coverage of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance over the last year.
The timeline incorporates videos, pictures and analysis from Sky’s crime correspondent Martin Brunt. Users can scroll through the timeline, which offers over 100 screens of multimedia.
The BBC is using Ordinance Survey maps to display traffic hotspots based on info from its Jam Cams.
Clicking through the flash-generated map takes you through to a live Jam Cam video feed which is updated every 10 minutes. The bigger the circles on the map, the more cameras are available in that area.
The BBC formerly used Google maps for the project, but has switched to the new format
Backpacker magazine has relaunched its website, which now contains new multimedia and GPS supported content.
The site features an interactive map containing more than 1200 GPS-supported hikes, expert blogs and on-the-scene video.
“Our primary focus was to create the ultimate outdoor adventure renaissance experience on the web” said editor Anthony Cerretani in a press release.
“We wanted users not only to get the most up-to-date information from the site, but also to be able to participate in the site’s evolution, utilising Web 2.0 applications to post trips, gear reviews, comments and more.”
The American site was rebuilt from the ‘bottom up’ responding to readers’ ideas for the new look.
The site will now update its content daily and make use of social media tools including RSS feeds, del.icio.us and Facebook. リンク先で https://xn--ecko1bc4iog.com/bonuses/ 登録すると、ジョイカジノ ボーナス がもらえます。オンラインカジノジョイカジノ[joycasino]がプレイヤーに与えるもの： 初回入金ボーナス – 最大 ¥200,000 🤑 🤑 🤑. さらに、2回目、3回目、4回目、5回目の入金でボーナスがもらえます。オンラインカジノjoycasinoの公式サイトのみ！ 🌋 🌋 🌋 🌋
Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at innovate use of Google mash-ups and online databases by the Norwegian press.
“Computer programming is also journalism,” Espen Andersen, the man charged with bringing the current affairs flagship of Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) kicking and screaming into the internet age, told Journalism.co.uk.
He should know. Andersen is one of Scandinavia leading practitioners in mashing-up news and creating new and compelling methods for ‘doing journalism’.
Aside from being an able producer of interactive maps, he’s also an advocate for making programming an essential and commonplace skill in the newsroom.
Andersen started running online databases and mash-ups for a local newspaper in Norway creating – amongst others – interactive stories about snails reeking havoc across the regions gardens.
The principles may be the same but the subject matter has changed somewhat now he’s at NRK, where his most recent creation was a database mapping Norwegian politicians; how they vote, which boards they sit on and with whom.
“The idea is to make information about these networks more easily available,” Espen Andersen told Journalism.co.uk.
He has been brought in to help Brennpunkt, the Norwegian equivalent of Panorama, use online tools more effectively in both gathering and presenting information.
His Politikerdatabasen creation currently contains information on all members of parliament in Norway and will expand to include information on the country’s 11,000 local politicians in May.
“This project is just as much a journalistic project as making a TV-programme or a documentary. It’s all about presenting information that is valuable to the audience,” said Andersen.
The aim of the project, he added, is to turn the database into a broader ‘power database’ by mapping political and corporate networks across Norway.
This mapping project followed the creation for another recent Brennpunkt documentary of a network map of the country’s oil industry.
“I think it is absolutely key to bring programmers into the newsrooms so they can get involved in journalistic projects at an early stage.
“Programmers can create solutions to process large quantities of information, e.g. from public sources, and present it in an engaging and orderly manner,” Andersen said.
Before joining Brennpunkt, Andersen created several high-profile online databases and mash-ups for local newspaper Budstikka.
“I learned quite a bit about what kind of stories engage people when I worked at Budstikka: it is often issues that are very close to them. For instance, we made an online map where people could fill in their parking fines,” he said.
“Using databases we were able to summarise the fines to find which parking lots people were most annoyed with. It was a great success.”
Other projects that were big hits with the local community was an interactive map detailing which parts of the region were most troubled by snails killing off plants – a huge problem for passionate garden owners in the area (see main image), and an event map on Google maps. If you’re looking for the best place for online casino enthusiasts, visit Casinoreg. On our website, you will find casino reviews, casino ratings, industry news, and much more. Visit our site at https://casinoreg.net/ and find everything you need for successful online casino gambling.
The latter showed all events taking place in the area the newspaper served, and even garnered international attention.
“It’s typical of working for a local newspaper that you think you are working on a really big story on political budgets and trends, and you find people do not click on the story at all,” Andersen (above) said. And here you can find all the information about the most popular collection of friv games.
Information for the databases and maps, he added, are usually taken from publicly available listings, databases and other sources such as the tax lists, Company’s House, polling companies.
“However, it is a problem, especially for local newspapers, that public institutions often charge big fees for this information which has been gathered on behalf of the public, using the taxpayers money,” he said.
These few problems aside, he’s hopeful that in a few years programmers in the newsrooms will be as natural as having picture editors.
Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for de Volkskrant, is part of the team behind EN.nl – a bold project to redesign the news site. The site makes the most of its users in reshaping its design and includes a healthy dose of technological innovation alongside this wiki attitude.
Baan says the team built a version of the site for the iPhone within an hour and making the site work across different devices is key to how it’s been built.
After an initial introduction to the site through Paul Bradshaw’s blog, Journalism.co.uk asked Baan for more insight into the project:
1) What is the thinking behind the design EN.nl? How will its features improve the delivery of news to readers?
EN asks readers to participate. The design wants to stimulate participation. The horizontal timeline (below) shows the rhythm of news, the published articles over the last 24 hours.
When there is breaking news this often results in large amounts of small articles. This will make the bars of the hours that the news breaks relatively high compared to the rest of the day.
EN.nl is an evolving project. The design is an experiment and we had positive and negative feedback on the horizontal timeline. Positive is that it enables you to scan over a hundred articles relatively fast. The negative aspect is that it doesn’t show hierarchy. Everything is time-based.
On a NING network we ask everyone to share ideas and thoughts. We are open about the development process and made this a public experience.
2) How do you decide what content makes it onto the site?
EN is linked to a feed from a Dutch Press agency (ANP). This makes the website – for now – a closed system with a focus on news. ANP produces around a hundred articles a day and covers the whole spectrum of news reporting in the Netherlands.
There are already people asking to write articles. For example one reader is already bending the system and creating interesting articles. He takes an article and uses this as a container for ‘more important’ news.
There are some things you have to think about when opening the system for everyone to write articles. Relevancy and the truth become more important. We trust press agencies. How do you build online trust or what is important in developing a reputation system? And how do you decide what article is relevant and for whom?. Should we syndicate more news sources and should we syndicate with bloggers?
I think EN will develop to something where everyone can write and submit articles and I think it will be closely linked to a relevancy system. If you are a soccer fan your definition of soccer related news is different than that of a non-soccer fan.
3) On Paul Bradshaw’s blog you said: ‘The database is the most valuable asset of a news organisation’ – can you explain why you think this?
The web is fragmenting or – maybe even better – the web is everywhere: on your mobile phone, television, widgets, feeds, website and more. Making information portable is important for a news organization, because you probably can’t develop something for every niche platform or website.
Making collections and connecting data creates new value. If your information is easily accessible and contains valuable meta information then this gives additional tools to a news organization and enables them to move fast or enable their readers to create the tools they desire.
If your news (articles, photos, audio, video) is stored with good meta information and accessible it makes it easy to work with third parties in developing new value like location based services or news linked to your profile on another website. And even more important it will be cheaper to develop since you don’t have to update your archive with meta information.
I don’t know exactly what device or service will be popular in five years, but I guess the article as a container will still be popular.
We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s live video streamed over the web from mobile phones from Qik.
1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi. I’m Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik.
Qik’s vision is to enable anyone with a camera-phone to stream live video from anywhere in the world to the web, TV, mobile phones, and gaming consoles.
2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
For news – immediacy of information is very important. Qik enables journalists to capture and report news live from wherever they are – without having to wait for the news truck to arrive.
It enables journalists to conduct better interviews by taking questions from anywhere in the world. It provides the ability for viewers on the web to send real-time chat messages to the person streaming the video straight to their phone enabling a high level of interactivity.
As a result journalists are able to conduct richer, better interviews. It also enables journalists to leverage anyone who may be at a particular event to capture the story for them.
3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are just getting started! 🙂
In our current invitation-only alpha release, users with Nokia smartphones can stream live video from their phones to anywhere on the web and playback their Qik videos from their phones.
We are working on addressing other smartphones and Java-enabled phones. We are also working on providing the ability to stream live from phone to phone.
4) Why are you doing this?
We truly believe that sharing and experiencing moments of your life with your friends, family and/or your world is invaluable.
5) What does it cost to use it?
We are currently in a free, invitation-only alpha stage.
6) How will you make it pay?
We are at a very early stage of bringing this innovation to market and focused on ensuring that we deliver high value to the billions of camera phone users globally.
Ien Cheng, publisher and managing editor of FT.com believe that newspaper websites need to be more responsive to the whims of the web and act like technology companies – adapting to the almost constant changes of the online environment.
Guardian PDA highlights Cheng’s strategic approach:
– Improving the development of new editorial products
– refining the subscription model
– changing the way the business works internally
The Nashua Telegraph‘s decision to publish a 15-minute video of Sidney Blumenthal, aide to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, while he was in police custody has been criticised by media commentator Roy Greenslade.
Writing on his blog, the former editor of The Daily Mirror said the video was ’embarrassing, humiliating and overly intrusive’.
“To show the footage of a person undergoing ritual humiliation while in police custody is a disgraceful act. It serves no public interest whatsoever,” he wrote.
Damon Kiesow, managing editor and online editor of the Telegraph, told Journalism.co.uk that the decision to publish the video was ‘typical practice’:
“During the course of our coverage we have published booking photos, police records and court documents related to the case. This is typical practice for us. In fact the story with the video also included a PDF containing nine pages of records including the sentencing document.”
Far from seeking to ‘humiliate’ Blumenthal, Kiesow said the paper – and other US media – had previously been accused of covering up his arrest by not reporting it immediately to protect Clinton’s election campaign.
“The Telegraph has been publishing video on the Web for almost three years. During that time we have published numerous court-related segments including police interviews and court hearings.
“Some have been very graphic and painful in detail but were published due to a significant local interest in the stories.
“The Nashua Police Department only recently implemented the technology that makes it possible for us to gain access to booking videos. Blumenthal is the second booking video we have requested, the first was not published due to technical difficulties on our end.”
Publishing the video was not an attempt to cast aspersions on Blumenthal, but was intended to give readers the opportunity to make up their own minds – with all the information provided.
“I think Roy Greenslade frames the question ‘why publish’ in exactly the wrong way, and by doing so pre-supposes both the answer and the potential public reaction to the video. In fact, this was the first story in our coverage that garnered any positive reader comments for Blumenthal.
“Obviously those predisposed to support or oppose Blumenthal will interpret it as they want. But it is not our place to try and guess what those interpretations are. We felt in this case, and in general, that supplementing our reporting with source documents is the best way to let readers make up their own minds.”
Is there an issue here about the medium: is multimedia content such as this more intrusive, as Greenslade suggests, and therefore arguably less in the public interest? Or does it better serve the readers by giving them all the information available?
So Brian Paddick started twittering and then the candidates lined up for an online grilling on Yoosk – but it hasn’t stopped there.
The Sun hosted an hour-long web chat with Boris Johnson yesterday, who answered questions from MySun readers. The answers to his questions are now on the Sun’s forums and have been edited into a couple of short video clips for the site. Brian Paddick will take part in a web chat on the site on April 25 at 1pm.
Elsewhere, Johnson fared less well with new media coverage: a mobile citizen journalist on the Evening Standard’s website captured the Conservative candidate admitting his plans to replace bendy buses in the capital would cost £100 million.
The Standard is running an interactive section covering the campaigns. The YouVote channel has been set up for users to submit images, video clips and comments and given today’s scoop, seems to be doing a good job.
The Roanoke Times has set up a multimedia blog as part of its coverage of the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings.
The One Year Later site aims to ‘capture the sights, sounds and events… as captured over a 24-hour period’ and is using a combination of videos and text stories to create an emotive memorial.
A live story map plotting the Times’ coverage has also been produced, in addition to a map aggregating external news coverage of the anniversary.
The blog also links to a guestbook for readers and archived content from the paper on the shootings.
